Brief notes in reply to a YouTube comment.
How is science is nested in the religious world view?
Question:
'Brettsparadox
1 year ago
I enjoyed the video. It makes sense that Atheism and science don't contain a value system, but I would make the argument they don't claim to. Science is just a tool. I think your making a leap by saying it is nested in religion. If you are arguing that religion is all subjective experience then the argument would make more sense to me but religion itself seems to be nested in subjective experience. Educate me, am I missing something here??'
Me:
From what i can see the religious/symbolic world view is an account of how humans experience thier consciousness.
There are structures and properties that are universal to human consciousness that are always there a priori, so it is not subjective as there are the same patterns in all human consciousness.
One example being when you see a glass of water; what that glass means to human consciousness is 'reach out hand in glass shaped grasping action and make movements necessary to drink restorative wet thing'.
It takes a lot of effort to remove all meaning humans give to the glass of water and then think in the scientific method to do things like carry out a valid experiment to determine the exact composition of the glass, the exact chemical composition of the water or the electrical conductivity of the water
You could do this, it requires a lot of rigor to maintain this world view and you can't do it for very long before you revert back to the pre scientific world view that it is a thing you reach out for to imbibe a restorative cold liquid.
The phenomenological view of the glass of water exists 'around' or 'before' (or is more immediate to your experience than) the scientific world view and has been the evolutionarily developed 'base reality' of our consciousness for thousands of years.
The scientific world view requires a huge amount of effort to temporarily get rid of all the symbolic meaning humans give to their experiences and then at some point it has to give way to the phenomenological foundation reality again.
Other questions that may be of benefit to consider:
Even when you are engaged in the scientific method, why are you undertaking it if not because doing that specific experiment brings you or someone else meaning?
Would a scientist undertake an experiment (the merging of the 'heavenly' realm of theory with the 'earthy' realm of observed sense data) if it was in no way meaningful to any human?
If no, then why is it meaningful?
And where did the structure of meaning come from?
Are there structures to the way meaning works that are universal to all humans?